#KNOCKOUT CITY RELEASE DATE TIME FREE#

But the skill ceiling is high, as the strategic and acrobatic options are rather impressive, and I’m honestly excited to see how the average match will unfold in some months. Similarly, these launch weeks for Knockout City have mainly seen people playing it slow, going for simple shots, standard dodges and parries and not much more – there’s even handy on-screen indicators for upcoming balls that help handling more complex scenarios even for newcomers. Now, the community learned to flick the ball at crazy speed mid-air, intercept dangerous shots by boosting upwards or fly off the ceiling to hit the ball from above. Around Rocket League’s launch, players were driving slow, giving slight nudges to the ball and accidentally hitting each other all the time.

Passes are very much encouraged as well, as chaining many can also increase the ball’s power, rendering shots even more devastating.įor these reasons, it will be interesting to compare the current state of the game to what it may become in a few months’ or years’ time. Shots can even be faked, and players can roll up into a ball themselves to let a teammate throw them for a lethal team-based takedown. Oncoming attacks can be parried or dodged, there’s a glide system reminiscent of Fortnite, balls can be intercepted mid-air, players can even use acrobatic moves such as spins and mid-air boosts, which in turn can unlock the option to give the thrown balls curvy angles and lobs. In reality, the game’s movement system adds a surprising amount of depth, making Knockout City somewhat closer to a fighting game than a traditional shooter. On a surface level, the gameplay loop is simple enough: find the balls, hit the opponents twice to take a life away, whoever gets 10 kills first wins the round, with a best of three to reach the goal of taking the match home. In these maps, you will not find weapon crates, ammo or health packs, only balls to pick up from the ground. In the game’s standard modes, two teams of 3 players join a classic arena that mimics the shooters of old, usually with a handful of choke points, intersections and some dynamic element in the middle, like a train or a wrecking ball that can cause havoc. But the gameplay loop, while sharing some mechanical similarities with the aforementioned Rocket Arena, is what truly stands here. No idea how many of those are paid customers, however.īut what about Knockout City attracted millions of players in such a short timeframe, in a market where unique multiplayer titles have low chance of surviving long? When even free-to-play titles often fail to make a splash? Visually, it’s certainly nothing out of the ordinary: slightly cartoony visuals not unlike in Rocket Arena or Overwatch, customizeable characters that players get to watch from their back in third person view, colourful vistas – stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Why didn’t EA commit to a F2P model at this point beats us, but the numbers this time seem to be on their side: 5 million players in a week and a half.

#KNOCKOUT CITY RELEASE DATE TIME FREE#

It’s included day one for all tiers of EA Play and Game Pass subsequently they made the first 25 XP levels of the game free for everyone, which followed the first 10 days of launch being completely free for all players.

But since the player numbers for Rocket Arena’s paid version were terrible at launch, the game received a massive 83% discount in its second week for Knockout City, to get ahead of such a price slashing, Electronic Arts decided to… more or less make the game free anyway. Once again, they chose not to opt for the popular free-to-play model that brought titles like Fortnite Battle Royale and Apex Legends to success, but to opt for a low entry barrier of 19.99 EUR/USD. If Electronic Arts wanted to avoid replicating the confusing launch of Rocket Arena, they didn’t quite manage to do that. Knockout City’s the name, and throwing balls is the game! Will this finally be it? It’s a fast-paced, acrobatic session of… dodgeball. This time, it’s with yet another class-based arena shooter, but perhaps shooter is the wrong term, since there’s no weapons of any kind. Only about a year after the lack of marketing and a confusing launch model impeded the interesting Rocket Arena from making a splash, Electronic Arts tries to push another small multiplayer phenomenon, trying to create their own success story akin to Rocket League.

Knockout city release date time